SDE-1 (Fixed Term Contract) at Amazon

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Online Assessment60 min

   The process began with an online assessment that included two coding questions, one of moderate difficulty and another quite tough. There was also a Workstyle Assessment, which served as a behavioral filter looking for alignment with Amazon’s core principles.

2. 2

   Technical & LP 160 min

   The first loop round opened with two questions about Leadership Principles, where I was encouraged to share stories from my work life, moments of ownership, customer focus, or handling setbacks. Moving to coding, I faced: Rotten Oranges: Classic matrix traversal to simulate rotting over time. I tackled it with BFS. Binary Tree Shortest Path: Given two nodes in a binary tree, print the shortest path between them. I broke my thought process into finding the lowest common ancestor and building the route accordingly.

   • Rotten Oranges
   • Binary Tree Shortest Path
3. 3

   Technical & LP 260 min

   This round followed a similar format with two LP questions at the start. The interviewer then gave: First Non-Repeating Character (Stream): For a running stream of characters, return the first non-repeating one at every index. I used a queue and hashmap, making sure to talk through why this pairing works best. Maximum Width of a Binary Tree: Required a level-order traversal and careful tracking of node positions to determine the maximum width. I explained the logic and coded a full solution, mentioning potential pitfalls and edge cases. Both coding questions were handled completely, with a focus on clarity and communication.

   • Find Non-Repeating Characters in a String
   • Maximum Width of a Binary Tree
4. 4

   Behavioral45 min

   Multiple Leadership Principle behavioral questions (related to ownership, bias for action, handling conflict, learning from failure)

What came up